February 24: First year anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine War

It doesn’t get more stereotypically establishment on foreign policy than to be the head of the Council on Foreign Relations as Richard Haass is. So his position on the prospects for peace would be notable for that reason alone. He believes Russia’s ability to subdue Ukraine is highly doubtful given what we’ve seen the last year. But his assessment of the prospects for an end to the war is sobering¹:

And yet the outlook for compromise is bleak. Putin appears determined to stay the course lest perceived defeat in Ukraine spur efforts by domestic rivals to remove him from power. Sanctions have had only a limited effect, as India, China, and others continue to purchase Russian energy. And Putin controls the political narrative at home, persuading many that Russia is a victim, forced by the US and NATO into a fight for survival against the West as a whole.

Ukraine, too, is disinclined to compromise. Nearly all Ukrainians are calling for the complete liberation of their country’s territory. The reason is straightforward: the war has changed minds. Ukraine’s military prowess, and the manifest shortcomings of the Russian military, have nurtured more than a little strategic optimism about what the future might hold.

Moreover, the war has hardened hearts. Russian atrocities, including bombing apartment buildings and executing civilians, has led to calls for reparations and war-crimes tribunals. Some would add to this list the removal of Putin and his inner circle from power, an outcome seen by many as essential if Ukraine is ever to have confidence in any peace settlement.

In short, the conditions are far from ripe for diplomacy. One day this will change, but that day appears to be far off. The good news (if there is any) is that the war may well become less intense as both sides face the difficulty of sustaining the magnitude of losses they have suffered this past year. They simply lack the manpower, equipment, and economic resources to do so. [my emphasis]

Haass is cautiously optimistic that Russia will not resort to tactical nuclear weapons, mentioning that both China and India are publicly opposing that option. “The bad news, though, is that the war will not end anytime soon.”

Here is a new discussion from the Quincy Institute² focusing on a key European angle in this European war, the “turning point” (Zeitenwende) that Germany’s Social Democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced last year after the invasion.

In that discussion, Rachel Rizzo of the Atlantic Council begins with a point that I’ve been focusing on heavily, the question of what the actual war aims of the US in particular are in this conflict. This question isn’t a matter of declaring ahead of time the exact nature of the postwar situation. It’s really about which of the two explicitly announced war aims of the Biden Administration is the priority: restoring the control of Ukraine over its sovereign territory, or the goal of severely weakening Russia militarily. Rüdiger Lüdeking seems to be alluding to that difference in his comments after 23:00 in the video.

However much those two goals may have converged in the events of the last year, those are distinct and, in the end, inconsistent. The second goal would be served better the longer the war continues; but the war itself is being fought on Ukrainian territory and doing severe damage to life and economic infrastructure.

The performance of the US Congress on this has been disappointing so far. The Republicans are so busy howling at the moon and obsessing over Hunter Biden’s laptop that they can’t do much constructive on the war policy. They are also divided between ritual condemnation of the Democratic President’s foreign policy and fealty to the arms manufacturers, the only group for which this war has been essentially all good.

The Democrats, for their part, are irresponsibly passive in examining the Democratic Administration’s policy. As nostalgic as it seems to say, Congress has a huge Constitutional role and responsibility in foreign policy and especially in war. They need to be holding serious public hearings on the Administration’s war policy after a year of this high-stakes war.

Austrian political analysis Robert Treichler³ describes the NATO position in the war at this point:

First, NATO does not want to become a [direct] party to the war under any circumstances.

Second, Putin should not be provided any excuse to use nuclear weapons.

Third, it must be prevented that any of the arms NATO delivered to Ukraine be used to start attacks on their [Ukraine’s] part on Russian territory.

As we see, all goals were achieved: the Ukrainians were armed enough that they can successfully protect themselves, and at the same time all three risks were avoided. This apparent success is no coincidence. NATO has measured its arms deliveries from the outset, especially in terms of the type of systems. This gives it the opportunity to pose new military problems for the Russian armed forces every few months. Even the public debates serve a purpose. Putin has to watch as the [West’s] willingness to provide Ukraine with more efficient weapons systems grows. These successive levels of escalation thus function similarly to the respectively tightened economic sanctions. [my emphasis]

The costs of the war, especially the human cost

That is the focus of this Deutsche Welle report⁴:

Chinese diplomat Wang Yi’s visit to Moscow

Wang Yi is State Councilor of China, a position being referred to in the Western press as China’s top diplomat, and previously served as Foreign Minister. (Foreign Ministers are usually referred to as the country’s top diplomat, but the press makes a distinction for Wang.) He made a high profile visit this week to Moscow purporting to have a peace proposal for the Russia-Ukraine War.

The Japan Times⁵ reported on February 21:

While China hasn’t released details of the peace plan, Wang said the proposal would include calls for territorial integrity to be respected, the protection of nuclear facilities and opposing the use of biochemical weapons. It was immediately met with some skepticism on the ground, with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock saying a Russian troop withdrawal of Ukraine must be a condition of any peace deal.

“A just peace cannot mean that the aggressor gets rewarded,” she said.

European officials familiar with the plan, who asked not to be identified, said it is expected to include calls for a cease-fire and for a halt to arms deliveries to Ukraine. They said the U.S. and its allies think Putin may make similar points during a speech on Tuesday in Moscow, and potentially offer a draft United Nations resolution on the Feb. 24 one-year mark to compete with one backed by Ukraine supporters demanding that Russia withdraw troops and end hostilities. [my emphasis]

China is Russia’s most important ally at the moment. So their position matters a lot.

In an appeal for a realistic perspective as opposed to reflexively cheering for whoever Our Side happens to be at the moment Matthew Duss⁶ of the Carnegie Endowment reminds us “how quickly the conventional wisdom on both Russia and China has shifted.” He’s referring in particular to bad-faith attempts to smear criticism of US foreign policy as unpatriotically supporting the Other Side.

Two decades ago, it was a given that China’s integration into the neoliberal order would both enrich it and then politically liberalize it. “American trade with China is a good thing, for America and for the expansion of freedom in China,” wrote the American Enterprise Institute’s Norman Ornstein in April 2000. “That seems, or should seem, obvious.” In the following years, Putin successfully presented Russia as a willing and able partner in the war on terror. In 2002, authors Ian Bremmer and Alexander Zaslavsky called the U.S.-Russia post-9/11 partnership “the most significant geopolitical realignment since the Second World War.”

The fact that the consensus view of both countries has now shifted so radically in a relatively short time should be enough to engender more humility  in our debates. Some may be trying to make up for their previous soft line by taking a harder one now. But accusing others of working on behalf of the enemy simply for raising legitimate questions about American national interests and concerns about the risks of war is a cheap way to constrain, if not avoid, that debate. [my emphasis]

The state of nuclear nonproliferation

This single largest collective failure of the great powers since 1989 is in the failure to expand and enhance nuclear nonproliferation agreements. Russia’s changed position on the New Start Treaty is a dramatic reminder of that.

Hans Kristensen, a researcher at the Federation of American Scientists and co-author of the Bulletin’s nuclear notebook, said that New START and nuclear arms control were important to Russia’s security too: “Without it, [the United States] could double [its] deployed arsenal.” Matt Korda, also at the Federation of American Scientists and co-author of the nuclear notebook, reacted: “This is a massive own-goal by Putin. Russia benefits from New START just as much as the United States. This decision is clearly political and emotional, not strategic.” Korda added that the expected biannual data exchange scheduled for March 1, 2023, “presumably won’t happen now.” This is a “huge loss for transparency,” he added.

James Acton, co-director of the Nonproliferation Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, had a pithier initial reaction on Twitter: “Well, this sucks.” With less transparency comes more uncertainty about the other party’s deployed nuclear forces, with a possible increase in the perceived threat, Acton said: “There’s an assumption that, by ‘suspending’ [rather than withdraw from] New START, Putin is signaling an intention to stay below the central limits. I think this is *probably* right but, in my opinion, there’s real uncertainty here.” Wolfsthal went further adding that “the loss of agreements will increase uncertainty and chances of misunderstanding, inflate threat perception and fuel accelerating arms race.”⁷

Historian Timothy Snyder knows a lot about Ukraine and Russia. But I’m not sure he understands this whole nuclear disarmament thing:⁸

Our nuclear talk is a way to claim victimhood, and then to blame the actual victims.  Once we turn our attention to a hypothetical exchange of missiles, we get to imagine that we are the victims.  Suddenly the actual war no longer seems to matter, since our lives (we imagine) are at risk.  And the Ukrainians seem to be at fault.  If only they would stop fighting, then we could all be safe.  This, of course, is exactly how Russian propagandists want us to reason.  And it is wrong. …

Yielding to Russian nuclear talk is also wrong, and embarrassingly so, as strategic thinking.  It is an example of a narcissistic fantasy that looms over discussions of American foreign policy: the fantasy of omnipotent submission.  This is the notion, birthed in American exceptionalism and impatience, that since America is the power behind everything, all will be well if America does nothing.  If we do what the Russian propagandists want, and do nothing for Ukraine, then (in this fantasy) there will be no nuclear war.

Nothing in US nuclear deterrence strategy or nuclear nonproliferation efforts is about claiming victimhood or “yielding to Russian nuclear talk.”

He seems to be so focused on opposing any thought that might lead the US and other NATO powers to offer anything but unconditional support to Ukraine in the war with Russia.

Doing nothing, in fact, always amounts to doing something, and usually (as in the case of Russian invasion) it is the wrong something!  In this case, doing nothing (to support Ukraine) would increase the risk of nuclear war.  By doing something specific, by supplying arms to Ukraine, the United States has assisted the Ukrainians in decreasing the chances of nuclear war.

As good of a historian as Snyder is, I’m afraid he’s really lost the thread of what nuclear war risk is about. Or maybe never understood it in the first place. If he actually thinks that nuclear arms control and realistic evaluation of nuclear threats are “the fantasy of omnipotent submission” and that we need “to work our way out from under it” - I’m not sure even his metaphor there is consistent - he really does not understand the threat of nuclear weapons.

Snyder has very high expectations of Our Side in the current war: “The forces Russia might have used in an attack on a NATO member are being destroyed in Ukraine.“ The idea that under some circumstances this might make Russia more inclined to use nuclear weapons rather than less doesn’t seem to have occurred to him. Even when the issue is running the risk of nuclear war, Snyder seems completely entranced with the idea that the only thing that matters is that the West goes along with whatever Ukraine wants (presumably as long as that means continuing to fight Russia!): “The Ukrainian leadership knows what it is doing.“

I don’t know how he talked himself into getting here. But whatever course he took, he winds up essentially saying that the US and NATO should completely ignore any Russian threats about using nuclear weapons.

In both the global and the Ukrainian settings, the Russian calculation is that nuclear talk will induce Europeans and North Americans to deter themselves from sending weapons.  But deploying talk is very different from deploying weapons.  Indeed, it is an alternative to doing so.  We too easily assume that the word must be the antecedent to the deed.  But the word is the deed.  When deploying nuclear talk is the policy, then actually deploying a nuclear weapon undoes the policy.  The implied threat is no longer available, once used.  And the Russian leadership knows that the Americans and everyone else would send more far, far weapons to Ukraine were Russia to use a battlefield nuclear weapon. [my emphasis] 

When it comes to blowing up people and things with nuclear weapons, no: the deed is the deed. His position is very close to being frivolous. He is correct as far as it goes when he says, “Nuclear weapons are symbolic, for different people in different ways.” But the symbolism is only there because the very real nuclear weapons are there. And he seems to have talked himself into thinking the risk of nuclear escalation in the Russia-Ukraine War is effectively nil.

He concludes with this sentence: “But that is the most important thing to say about nuclear war: it's not happening.“

Until it does.

Bruce Jentleson⁹ argues that the general public in the US takes the risks of nuclear war considerably more soberly than Timothy Snyder appears to:

Recent polling by the Ronald Reagan Foundation found 69 percent of respondents are concerned about the threat of nuclear war—the highest indication of such fear since the Foundation first asked this question in 2018. That the threat was posed as “in the next five years” helps explain why 57 percent nevertheless still favored supporting Ukraine at the moment. It’s one thing for the public to affirm support for not giving in to nuclear threats when these are hypotheticals. It’d be quite another if the threat becomes more imminent, all the more if it’s coming from a beleaguered Vladimir Putin. Putin’s recent state of his union speech, suspending even any semblance of compliance with the New START treaty, threatening to resume nuclear tests, and announcing Russian strategic systems are now on combat duty only ratcheted up the nuclear threat higher than it’s been since the war started. [my emphasis]

1. Haass, Richard (2023): Why the War Will Continue. Project Syndicate 02/23/2023. <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/russia-ukraine-war-no-appetite-for-compromise-by-richard-haass-2023-02> (Accessed 2023-23-02).

2. The Promise & Peril of Germany’s Post-Ukraine Foreign Policy Shift. Quincy Institute YouTube channel 02/23/2023. (Accessed 2023-24-02).

3. Treichler, Robert (2023): Putin provozieren, aber richtig In: Profil. <https://www.profil.at/meinung/robert-treichler-putin-provozieren-aber-richtig/402316484> (Accessed: 2023-04-02) My translation from the German.

4. Shifting geopolitics: War without end, war without a winner? DW News YouTube channel 02/23/2023. (Accessed 2023-23-02)

5. China looks to convince world it can broker Russia-Ukraine peace. Japan Times/Bloomberg 02/21/2023. <https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/02/21/asia-pacific/politics-diplomacy-asia-pacific/china-convince-russia-ukraine-peace/> (Accessed: 2023-21-02).

6. Duss, Matthew (2023): Foreign-Policy Dissenters Deserve a Fair Hearing. Foreign Policy 02/23/2023. <https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/02/23/iraq-ukraine-antiwar-china/> (Accessed 2023-23-02).

7. Diaz-Maurin, François (2023): Russia suspends New START and is ready to resume nuclear testing. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 02/21/2023. <https://thebulletin.org/2023/02/russia-suspends-new-start-and-is-ready-to-resume-nuclear-testing/> (Acessed: 2023-23-02).

8. Snyder, Timothy (2023): Nuclear war! Why it isn't happening. Substack 02/08/2023. <https://snyder.substack.com/p/nuclear-war> (Acessed: 2023-23-02).

9. Jentleson, Bruce (2023): Will the American-Ukraine Consensus Start to Crack? The National Interest 02/22/2023. <https://nationalinterest.org/feature/will-american-ukraine-consensus-start-crack-206241> (Acessed: 2023-23-02).